Long Beach City Council needs a Cambodian New Year's resolution

Our city council has taken care of business here in Long Beach. It has given full-throated support to Meatless Mondays, it has painted crosswalks different colors, it has made the city the died-and-gone-to-heaven place for bicycles and their riders, and it has thrown a mess of parties, including something called the Request For Information Release Party, which we didn’t attend because we lacked the proper attire. It had Kitty Hall in September, about which we can’t, apparently, say enough.

On a broader level, it passed a resolution to support the effort to bring a football stadium to Carson, and it has thrown its legislative weight behind President Obama’s executive actions to reduce gun violence.

But it didn’t do much about the impending visit of the son of a brutal and avaricious Cambodian dictator’s son to Long Beach, where he is scheduled to participate in the April 10 Cambodian New Year Parade.

More than 200 members of Long Beach’s expansive Cambodian community tued out Tuesday to protest the plaed visit of Hun Manet, a West Point-trained general in the Cambodian military and eldest son of Cambodian prime minister Hun Sen. Public comment against the visit ran over an hour, with no one Idea in favor of the visit.

It is perhaps unfair to blame the son for the sins of the father – and those sins are many and grievous and include massive land grabs forcing the illegal eviction of thousands of Cambodians and holding dictatorship in a country which, since 1991, has seen more than 300 people killed in political attacks – there has been little to show that the apple has put much distance between itself and the tree. Ou Virak, president of the Phnom Penh-based Cambodian Center for Human Rights compared Manet to the sons of Libya’s Gaddafi and North Korea’s Kim Jon-Il, neither of whom has shown to stray from the paths paved by their fathers.

Tuesday’s council action on the matter was about as passive as it could get. Councilman Dee Andrews got the slow ball rolling, by telling the protesters, “I’m letting you know, as I sit here today, that I will not be a part, or participate in a parade of that matter.”

Mayor Robert Garcia, too, will miss the parade (though due to a scheduling conflict) and Vice Mayor Suja Lowenthal threw the whole squad on the bandwagon, declaring “None of us is going to this parade.”

Missing any chance to be in a parade is a significant sacrifice for any politician, so that’s something, though it’s more than a little passive. We’ve been missing parades most of our life to no ill effect.

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Garcia, so far, is taking a conciliatory stance on the matter, calling for the protesters to be peaceful in the event Manet attends.

The council has no power to bar Manet from coming to town, and it doesn’t have the authority to un-invite him.

But it doesn’t have any powers regarding vegetarianism or national gun control efforts, either.

It can join the protesters, though, in expressing an opinion and at minimum drafting a resolution expressing its displeasure, if not disgust, for bringing in Manet, who to the Cambodians in Long Beach, is a personified reminder of the horrors of the Khmer Rouge, Pol Pot, the Killing Fields and the other nightmares that are still overly fresh in their memories and histories.

Contact Tim Grobaty at 562-714-2116, [email protected], @grobaty on Twitter.